A new clinical training program that aims to increase access to comprehensive obesity care is launching next summer at UMass Chan Medical School.
The Obesity Medicine Fellowship is a one-year program providing advanced subspecialty training in the field of obesity medicine through a clinical preceptorship model.
“Obesity is an extremely prevalent disease. It’s associated with an increased risk for many diseases that affect people’s health and their ability to lead healthy lives,” said Amin Sabet, MD, assistant professor of medicine and program director for the Obesity Medicine Fellowship. He is an endocrinologist specializing in obesity in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at UMass Memorial Medical Center.
Dr. Sabet said the fellowship will help increase awareness of obesity as a disease, access to medical treatments and cooperation among health care providers. The field of obesity medicine is a “young specialty,” he said, and recent breakthroughs in obesity medicine, including popular new medicines semaglutide (Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Zepbound and Mounjaro), can reduce obesity-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
“The improvements in our understanding of the science of obesity and improvements in all the treatments for this serious disease have rapidly accelerated in the past 10 to 20 years. There's been a tremendous amount of work, research and advancement in all types of obesity treatment. These advances in our ability to treat obesity have led to an explosion in the interest of doctors in becoming specialized in obesity medicine,” Sabet said.
Nina Rosano, MD, assistant professor of medicine, will serve as the associate program director. Dr. Rosano is the director of the Metabolic Weight Loss Program at UMass Memorial Medical Center and vice president of the New England Obesity Society.
“We are profoundly affected by obesity in Central Massachusetts. We want to make sure that patients understand the complexity of the disease and have access to safe clinical care with new modern medicine rather than just a sporadic spotlight in a clinical office,” Rosano said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, in Massachusetts in 2022, more than 27 percent of adult residents were considered obese.
Rosano said, “By training obesity experts of the future, this fellowship program will support our community in a positive way, giving patients an opportunity to be treated properly, providing comprehensive options, with hope that this disease will be cured in the future.”
This new fellowship program at UMass Chan is one of 30 such programs in the United States specializing in obesity medicine that are recognized by the Obesity Medicine Fellowship Council and eligible for the Fellowship Pathway of the American Board of Obesity Medicine.
The program will accept one fellow each year.
“We want the applicants to be prepared for careers in obesity medicine, whether they are purely dedicated to clinical care of patients with obesity medicine, advancing knowledge in obesity medicine through scholarly activity or the education of others in obesity medicine,” Sabet said.
